Posts Tagged ‘Ron Wood’

The CREATION – ” Album Reissue’s “

Posted: October 29, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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The Creation

Celebrating a cult UK singles band who rode the wave of the mid-60s musical revolution just long enough to forge a handful of mercurial tracks and showcase the originality and fire of their unique guitarist, Eddie Phillips – a pioneer of the violin-bow guitar and feedback. The Creation are one of the UK’s great ‘should’ve beens’. Though they never entered a studio with the intention of creating an album (“We Are Paintermen” was the nearest thing to it, and it’s a series of singles, B sides and originals cobbled together with covers), their best tunes were visceral lightning strikes of creativity that echoed through the ages: they inspired Alan McGee to name his record label (and his indie band), and contributed to the DNA of bands like The Jam and Oasis, as well as being covered by artists as diverse as Sex Pistols, Television Personalities, Boney M and Ride and having a song used in the Wes Anderson movie Rushmore.

Eddie Phillips, among his many and varied talents, was likely the first guitar player to use a violin bow to excite the strings of his electric guitar. A trick that came to be most famously associated with Led Zep behemoth Jimmy Page and perhaps most memorably, Nigel Tufnel in his onstage guitar solo in This Is Spinal Tap, this gimmick wasn’t the only trick Phillips had up his sleeve.

In the chaotic onstage environments of the 60s, semi-acoustic guitars and amps cranked to the max made feedback a necessary evil for the new wave of electric-guitar players. Yet Phillips was one of the pioneering few who developed this technical obstacle into a strength, coaxing swathes of musical feedback out of his overdriven setup – he graduated from a Futurama and Vox’s to a Gibson ES-335 and a 200-watt Marshall with 8×10 cabinets – and incorporating the wild screams into his studio sound. Making Time and Painter Man both showcase a guitarist way ahead of his game.

He does have one regret, though: Phillips parted ways with his beloved cherry red ES-335 in the 70s and in 2007, put out a plaintive plea for its return. Its distinctive wear includes three hacksaw marks near the pickup selector switch from an experiment before settling on the bow for sustain.

“I was trying to figure out a way to play something on the E string to keep it going, like a drone, while I hammered on some kind of solo with my left hand on the other strings,” Phillips . First I tried a hacksaw – I took out the blade and put a guitar string in, tried sawing across the E string, but that only resulted in me wearing three or four massive grooves in the bottom horn of my 335 from the ends of the saw [laughs]. So that obviously wasn’t going to work.”

How Does It Feel To Feel (Yellow Vinyl)

The Creation was formed in 1966 from beat combo The Mark Four, and was quickly signed to a production deal with Shel Talmy, The Who’s producer. The first release was the urgent Making Time, which featured guitarist Eddie Phillips playing his guitar with a violin bow, two years before Jimmy Page started doing so. Alongside the We Are Paintermen LP, How Does It Feel To Feel rounds up the remainder of the recordings they made with Shel Talmy.

This LP features the 2016 stereo mixes of Creation classics How Does It Feel To Feel (both the UK and US versions), Life Is Just Beginning and Sylvette. The last 60s line- up of The Creation, which featured future Face and Rolling Stone Ron Wood, is represented by all four sides of their two single releases.

A rumour persists that Phillips’ contemporary Pete Townshend was so impressed that he asked the guitarist to join The Who as the second guitarist. Phillips himself demurs, telling journalist Chris Hunt: “If he asked me, I didn’t hear him! I think that was a bit of sharp press.” Alas, the mouthwatering prospect of having two of the wildest guitar pioneers of the 60s in one band was too good to be true. Still, at least we have Phillips’ Creation playing, presided over in the studio by Shel Talmy, the innovative producer behind early classics such as The Kinks’ You Really Got Me and The Who’s My Generation, and there’s a lot of excellent guitar action to uncover.

Pressed on 180 gram yellow vinyl, the inner sleeve features 60s photos of The Creation from the collection of designer Phil Smee.

Demrec287 the creation how does it feel sticker

We Are Paintermen (Blue Vinyl)

The Creation was formed in 1966 from beat combo The Mark Four, and was quickly signed to a production deal with Shel Talmy, The Who’s producer. The first release was the urgent Making Time, which featured guitarist Eddie Phillips playing his guitar with a violin bow, For a change of pace, Try And Stop Me eases off the scene-stealing guitar in favour of precisely intonated, ultra-clean chordal jangle, but the speeding stomp of Biff Bang Pow, propelled by its My Generation-esque riff, returns to the fray with a gloriously frantic guitar solo that quickly abandons the idea of chord melody in favour of angry bends and hammer-ons.

A final pre-split 60s single contains two essential Creation tracks outside of We Are Paintermen, How Does It Feel To Feel and Life Is Just Beginning, which feature swaggering, unhinged edge-of-feedback solo and plectrum-on-string scrapes and psychedelic strings, respectively. Issued in 1967, We Are Paintermen was the only Creation LP released during their original 60s incarnation, and then only in Germany. With the exception of Making Time and Try And Stop Me, this release features the 2016 stereo mixes of Creation classics Through My Eyes, Biff Bang Pow, Can I Join Your Band? and Painter Man (as later covered with huge success by Boney M).

Pressed on 180 gram blue vinyl, the inner sleeve features 60s photos of The Creation from the collection of designer Phil Smee.

Demrec286 the creation we are paintermen packshot sticker

Psychedelic Rose

The Creation was formed in 1966 from beat combo The Mark Four, and was quickly signed to a production deal with Shel Talmy, The Who’s producer. Painter Man, their only UK Top 40 hit, has a superb riff, a viciously strummed Townshend-esque chord interlude and a skrawking violin-bow coda; on Through My Eyes, Phillips anchors the song’s soporific, prowling backbeat with a mesmerising bend-based riff motif and unison-bend solo; Tom Tom taps into the same vein as The Beatles’ She Said She Said, adding an off-kilter double-tracked solo and even a section at 2:32 with a feedback-and-killswitch effect.

In January 1985, The Mark Four reformed for a one-off show in Cheshunt, and subsequently Eddie Phillips and original lead vocalist Kenny Pickett reunited to make some new Creation recordings. At the time, only two tracks – Spirit Called Love and a new version of Making Time – were issued as a single in 1987, before the record label went out of business. These two tracks plus the remainder of the recordings were finally issued as the album Psychedelic Rose in 2004. The album is pressed on 180 gram red vinyl.

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Power Surge

Alan McGee was such a big fan of The Creation that he named his record label after the band, and named his own band after one of their songs – Biff Bang Pow. The Creation was formed in 1966 from beat combo The Mark Four, and was quickly signed to a production deal with Shel Talmy, The Who’s producer. This limited edition reissue is pressed on purple vinyl, and features the original inner sleeve. The first release was the urgent Making Time, which featured guitarist Eddie Phillips . Whilst very popular in Germany, UK success largely eluded the band, and after a number of non-charting singles and line-up changes, the band broke up in 1968 without ever having released an album. In 1995, following a reunion concert at Harlesden’s Mean Fiddler, Alan McGee and Joe Foster managed to persuade the original line-up of Eddie Phillips, lead singer Kenny Pickett, bassist Bob Garner and drummer Jack Jones to get into a studio and record a new album, for release on Creation Records!.

Demrec289 the creation power surge packshot sticker

The Creation never achieved the recognition they deserved and after singer Kenny Pickett quit, Phillips followed suit later in 1967. The band continued, with Ron Wood in the lineup, until 1968, released some more soul-flavoured material, then dissipated, seemingly for good. They reactivated in the 1990s and despite reforming and playing with Phillips as the only original member and attempts to recapture the spark, such as 1996 album Power Surge, world-straddling success wasn’t to be theirs.

Instead, they’ll go down in rock history as a quintessential cult band, trapped in amber between the British Invasion and the birth of psychedelia, and hopefully, appreciated for the scything, exhilarating playing of their lead guitarist. A philospophical Phillips told Record Collector: “If we could go back and change the fortunes of The Creation, we may have been a really big band for a time but may not be remembered now like we are. I’m alright with things.”

RON WOOD & RONNIE LANE – ” Mahoney’s Last Stand “

Posted: February 5, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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The backstory goes that this was recorded — at least partially — when Rod Stewart failed to show up for various 1972 Faces’ sessions. The rest of that band, along with some high profile players such as horn men Bobby Keys and Jim Price, Pete Townshend, and Family’s (later Blind Faith’s) Rick Grech among others, recorded tracks which were spliced into the titular film. The movie was never given a proper theatrical release, but the soundtrack was finally made available on vinyl in an inauspicious 1976 release that quickly went out of print. 

While the music, much of it instrumental reflecting the nonchalant sessions, isn’t always compelling, it’s consistently listenable. Given the iffy circumstances of its creation, these (mostly) jams catch fire more often than not. And the sheer quality of the names involved, most of which were arguably at the height of their powers, make even the most unfocused moments worth hearing.

Veteran producer Glyn Johns likely edited the music into shorter spurts, keeping the best bits so even the more directionless improvisations such as “Car Radio” blast out with a scrappy yet inviting energy. Acoustic flashes such as “Hay Tumble” featuring Grech’s fiddle, along with “Woody’s Thing” and the bluesy country honk of “Rooster’s Funeral” spotlighting Wood’s slide work capture a rambunctious vitality comparable to the first four Rod Stewart albums and the Faces’ at their peak. Some selections such as the unpromisingly named “Title One” sound like background music to a typical 70’s TV cop show, albeit above average for that scenario. The swampy slow blues of “Mona the Blues,” one of the vocals, which contains biting slide guitar from Wood is a lost gem. Along with Ronnie Lane’s heartbreaking, lovely roots folk/pop “Just for a Moment” — also included in an instrumental version — they justify the price of this labor-of-love remastered reissue. Freshly penned liner notes fill in the blanks about both the obscure movie and its music, but get out the magnifying glass to read the individual track credits, reprinted in frustratingly tiny type.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRcWMkJKJOQ

Those familiar with Ronnie Lane and Pete Townshend’s far superior Rough Mix or the instrumental “Apple Jam” sessions tacked onto George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass will hear and appreciate similarities in this disc’s freewheeling pieces.

Mahoney’s Last Stand may not be a lost classic, but for fans inclined towards the music of Wood, Lane, Stewart and the Faces during these years, it’s undoubtedly enjoyable and a minor delight to have back in print.

The ROLLING STONES – ” Bridges to Babylon ” Released on September 23rd, 1997

Posted: September 25, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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The Bridges to Babylon Tour

According to Mick Jagger, “The title came from looking at the stage. Because it was going to be the name of the tour as well as the record—it all had to fit together. We were looking at the stage one day and trying to find where we were with it. What does this design say to us? I came up with the ‘Bridges’ idea and a friend of mine came up with the Babylon thing. The bridge to the B-stage worked perfectly most nights, except when it was too cold or too hot, and then it had to be sort of manually got together. It was always my worry that it wasn’t gonna actually open.”

The Bridges To Babylon tour was announced in a press conference held underneath the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City and began on 9th September 1997 with a warm up show in Toronto, Canada, followed by another at The Double Door In Chicago. It officially began on 23rd September at Chicago’s Soldier Field followed by 55 more shows in North America, nine shows in South America, six shows in Japan and thirty-seven shows in Europe.

The production was designed by Mark Fisher, Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger and Patrick Woodroffe and opened with a circular central screen exploding with fireworks, from which guitarist Keith Richards emerged playing the riff to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”.

This was the first tour on which the B-stage featured at almost every gig; the stage design included a 46 m (150 ft) long telescoping cantilever bridge that extended from the main stage to a ‘B’ stage in the centre of the stadiums. The only issue according to Keith was the fact that out door shows had the unpredictability of the weather to contend with.

“There’s another guy that joins the band on outdoor stages: God. Either he’s benign or he can come at you with wind from the wrong direction and the sound is swept out of the park. The weather normally comes good around show time… but not always.’ Keith

Keith also pointed out that, “The bigger shows are harder to play, even though that’s what we do most of the time, because we are so locked into lighting systems and computers: the more constructed you have to be, because of the size of the operation. When we play on the B-stage or at a club venue, for us it’s just like coming back home—sweating it up a bit.”

Babylon oslo

All in all this was another massive step forward in terms of the number of people who came watched The Stones perform: 4.8 million at 108 shows in 25 countries.

It concluded on 19th September 1998 in Istanbul, Turkey. Five shows were cancelled (in Marseilles, Paris, Lyon, Bilbao and Gijón), and five more were postponed (in Italy, Ireland and Great Britain).

As the ’90s wore on, Jagger became concerned with keeping the Rolling Stones fresh. That led directly to some of the dated experimentation on Bridges to Babylon, released on September. 23rd, 1997.

“There is a great danger when you’ve done all these albums … that you think you know how to make a record,” Jagger said in 1997. “Someone writes a song and there is something in the song that you recognize: ‘Oh, I know what that is. I’ll get my slide guitar.’ I don’t want to do that first thing that comes to mind.”

Over-worried about sounding too much like themselves after succumbing to a kind of easy classicism on 1994’s Voodoo Lounge, the Rolling Stones ended up going too far the other way. That meant bringing in then-hip producers John King and Mike Simpson. Known professionally as the Dust Brothers, they’d most recently been working with Beck.

“Anybody Seen My Baby,” the lead-off single, was doomed to parody by their decision to include a sample of Biz Markie‘s 1986 track “One Two.” Deep cuts like “Might as Well Get Juiced” suffered too, as its generically electronic backing track felt somehow both relentless and largely without detail. Hiding somewhere within this tune is something that could have harkened back to the edgy smack-laced danger of 1972’s Exile on Main St. The loop-driven “Saint of Me,” written in tribute to their late long-time sideman Billy Preston, suffers a similar fate. It’s a pretty good Stones song lost in a maze of studio tricks.

Jagger even brought in the sleek R&B producer Babyface to work on “Already Over Me” at one point, before discarding the tapes. “It’s full of fance – that’s funk and dance put together,” guitarist Ron Wood enthused in a 1997 . Fans were less enthusiastic, as the album became the Rolling Stones’ first ever – including 1986’s lightly regarded Dirty Work – to finish outside the U.K. Top 5. Bridges to Babylon ended up selling a million copies, but that was far less than the multi-platinum sales of their two most recent studio projects.

You could hardly blame Keith Richards. Favoring an abandoned back-to-basics approach, he ended up contributing some of his strongest material, and simply stayed well away from the more modernized stuff. Waddy Wachtel, the ace Los Angeles session guitarist, sat in on “Anybody Seen My Baby,” which was rumored to have been about actress Mary Badham of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. Richards doesn’t even appear on “Saint of Me.”

He claimed there were no hard feelings, despite early reports of tensions in the studio. “You always have to deal with other people’s preconceptions of what their version of the Stones is – and we can’t be everything to everybody,” said Richards “All we can do is be true to ourselves as much as possible, and say, ‘This is us now, take it or leave it.’”

Richards collaborated exclusively with stalwart Stones producer Don Was on the reggae-inflected “You Don’t Have to Mean It,” the soul-drenched “Thief in the Night” and his devastatingly sad album-closing “How Can I Stop.” All of them would have sounded more at home on one of Richard’s then-recent solo projects, For his part, Richards argued that while Bridges to Babylon may not have always worked, it had at least been interesting.